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Thu, 10 Mar 2016 16:47:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.4Anguish and Amnesia: The Episcopal Church and Communionhttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2016/03/anguish-and-amnesia-the-episcopal-church-and-communion/
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:01:04 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1262Download the full text of this article with footnotes (PDF)

The hurt

The sense of sorrow and sometimes indignation expressed by many TEC bishops over the Primates’ meeting and its decisions is understandable. The sentiment of grief comes in many forms. For some (e.g. Connecticut), “sadness” is marked by a warning against primatial overreach. For others (e.g. New Hampshire), TEC is experiencing pain because she is being persecuted like Jesus. For some (e.g. Western New York), the Primates gathering “fails” as an ecclesial council and is but a “clanging cymbal” in its understanding of communion. Some (e.g. California) went so far as to accuse the Primates, on this “sad day”, of acting in a manner “antithetical to the way of Christ”, and of being “dishonest”, “devious”, and “scapegoating”.

Despite these strong notes of distress, TEC’s episcopal responses are generally gracious. They also almost all assert the fact that nothing has changed, nothing will change, and that TEC’s decisions regarding same-sex marriage are immovable. In this way, sadness is bound to a sense that the Primates’ common counsel is mostly irrelevant.

It is true that the Primates’ decisions mark a clear rejection of TEC’s policies and decisions at its own General Convention. Nobody likes to have people forcefully disagree with them; and the matter of same-sex marriage is one of deep feeling and passion, and also irresolvable contradictions in presupposition and perspective among disputants. It is painfully grating when fellow Christians and thoughtful human beings insist they cannot agree with another’s point of view.

I suppose it is also understandable that one might mourn the fact that such deep disagreements give rise to tangible estrangement. While the Primates insisted that TEC remains a beloved sister church in the Communion, they don’t want TEC representing the Anglican Communion or voting at Communion councils on matters of doctrine and polity. That too is painful. It is hard to hold together talk of “love” and the imposition of disciplinary “consequences”. All of us want voice and vote within our communities, and when these are restricted or taken away, we feel that our place in that community has itself been threatened or diminished.

So, I say, let the bishops vent. It’s only natural. We have all been venting about these kinds of things, each from our own vantage of experienced threat and diminishment, over the past few years.

But we should beware of confusing our hurts with ecclesial realities. In this case, TEC bishops have, one after the other, insisted that the Primates have no “right” or “authority” to make the decisions they have done, or to implement them. TEC bishops have said that the Anglican Communion has no means to shape their participation in its councils. They have said that the Communion itself has nothing to do with common teaching and an ordered common council. They have said, finally, that the Anglican Communion has historically been nothing like what the Primates have said it is. All of these claims are questionable, perhaps even false.

Historical Errors about the Communion

Let me take each of them in reverse order:

1. The nature of the Anglican Communion:

TEC bishops as a whole seem to have adopted the view that the Anglican Communion is a serenely immovable reality wherein independent churches around the world respect one another, enjoy each other’s company, and let each other do as each pleases. This is normative, they say, and has always been thus. The Primates are innovators, they assert.

This characterization is a gross historical fabrication. Respect, personal interaction, and legal independence among Communion churches, yes: but these constitute the thinnest veneer of communion life imaginable, and do not begin to touch the historical reality of the Anglican Communion itself.

The Anglican Communion is an entity that is both the product of and the continued subject of dynamic evolution. There is no “always thus” in the Communion. This dynamism, furthermore, has not been haphazard. It has been consistently driven by three much more profound elements, which I list in order of historical importance: mission, catholicity, and the witness of ecumenical unity.

This is no place for a history lesson, although it seems that reminders remain necessary. We can outline, then, what such a lesson would involve and how it would turn up some key continuities. There has been a clear current in the Communion’s emergence and evolution according to these elements of mission, catholicity, and witness to unity.

First, England Reformation had at its core a sense of catholicity; in part, this drove Cranmer to be one of the Church’s first deliberate ecumenists, searching for council and unity in Europes. Then there were the complex and knotted politics of a divided realm – England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 17th century especially — that forced the Church of England to reconsider its link to the apostolic mission of the Church catholic. Next came the impulses of those vibrant mission societies that, in the 18th century, moved from England into the wider world of Britain’s colonial expansion, channeling the new pluralistic energies of the nation into a shared religious fervor for sharing the Gospel. By this point the missionary current had begun to flow deeply and strongly. It was linked to the earlier Reformation press for disseminating Scriptural knowledge. When the Protestant Episcopal Church’s late 18th- and early 19th-century life unfolded, concerns regarding the catholicity of Anglican witness took explicit hold in the face of vying Christian communities within America. (It was also a time when we see the first expressions of American Episcopalian exceptionalism – “we’re different”.) More missionary impulses flowed out from this period, and took form in a range elements that, after around 1850, became associated with something called “the Anglican Communion”: Canterbury, Lambeth Conferences, more mission, Anglican Congresses, more mission, formal ecumenical engagement in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies especially, more and more mission, and then the cascading organizing symbols of the Communion Office, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates’ Meeting in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Finally, in the early 21st century, emerged the rumbling flow of the Covenant Process. And yes, more mission – in Asia, Africa, South America, and beyond as the Christian Gospel offered from Anglican hands and voices took wing outside the fading religious precincts of the West.

Mission, catholicity, and unity have all driven the Communion’s emergence and formal articulation, as well as its developing order. What is more, American Episcopalians have, until recently, been at the forefront of this river of divine energy. This is all historically demonstrable, and TEC bishops today forget this at the risk of forgetting who they really are and why they are bishops at all. Saddened as I too am, in this case by TEC’s actions at Convention, I am grateful that I have been an Episcopalian: for because of this Communion dynamic that the Episcopal Church came out of and contributed to, I heard the Gospel of Christ Jesus, learned the faith, was caught up within the Scriptures, and drawn into the life of a world of unimagined yet holy believers from across the continents. It has been a foretaste of heaven in many ways, even with its all too this-worldly disappointments.

There has never been a stable or ideal “Anglican Communion”. It has always been “on the move”. Describing the Communion in such a dynamic way, of course, also includes contestation and debate: that too has always been a part of the flow of life that has moved evangelically around the globe since its first springs in early modernity. (The Anglican Communion is a quintessentially modern phenomenon, in the sense of it being a vessel of the one Gospel’s adaptation to this epoch of human history.) The role of the Primates is itself a part of this contestation. But there is a difference between debate that seeks to unleash the current of the Gospel and one that ends by stymying it. The last 15 years have seen a dam built up, through often intentionally stoked conflict, to block the Communion’s evangelical dynamism. Now that the Primates have sought to unblock it, they can hardly be called unfaithful to the Communion’s character.

For communion more broadly, and the Anglican Communion in particular is not a “thing”, but a movement in service of a divine gospel and evangelical imperative: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” and making us “ambassadors for Christ” who beseech the world for our Lord (2 Cor. 5:19, 20). The dynamic elements of Mission/Catholicity/Ecumenical Witness that mark the Anglican Communion are not theological criteria; rather they embody a divine vocation empowered by God’s own life. TEC can decide this vocation is not hers; or she can dispute its articulation. But to press for that vocation’s subversion as taken up by her sister churches is not only antagonistic, it has led her to embarrassing and shameful offenses, like the cultural racism that, in TEC hands, now paints African and non-Western church leaders as socially primitive exemplars of an undeveloped religiosity. It is a divinely developing Communion, by contrast, upon which the Primates have in fact made their wager.

It is, in any case, interesting to see TEC bishops, who frequently applaud the Holy Spirit’s progressive revelatory capacity in their own midst, assert an entity called “the Communion” in a way that is closer to the ahistorical and static platonic form of some imagined (and indeed, historically unreal) ideal that has never existed. It is a view that now strangely seeks to trump truths articulated in the process of catholic debate and discernment within the larger church.

2. Common teaching and ordered common council

TEC leaders like to describe this impassible Communion as something antithetical to shared teaching and decision-making. To be sure, these elements often seem in tension or even conflict with the dynamic character of the Anglican Communion. Common teaching and council was made difficult just at the moment when the Communion gained clear public profile in the late 19th century and beyond, due to a host of sociological changes: pluralizing indigenous leadership, the rise of the seminaries and their diverse formations, ideologies of debate and resistance that mimicked civil political attitudes, polities of individual choice. We see some of these social changes influencing debates already in England in the 17th century, in the Anglo-American world of the 18th-centurhy, and in formal ecclesiastical party strife in the mid-19th century. By the 20th century, diversity and divergence became positive cultural values in the eyes of many Westerners especially. It is, in any case, a political reality out of which we do not seem able of move, and for which we have no obvious alternative. Nobody seems to agree on much of anything these days, and civil political life is more and more about managing disagreement, rather than shaping and enacting common vision.

Nonetheless, in the midst of these social developments, the press for alternatives to such degraded diversity has in fact been central to the Communion’s life and for one main purpose: mission, catholicity, and ecumenical witness. Although hardly immune to the tensions and struggles of expanding diversity, the Anglican Communion has always sought for ways to overcome unchecked diversity’s debilitating and dispiriting elements. Thus, mission societies aimed at common catechesis around the globe; the Lambeth Conferences were first convened and continued to search for ways of resolving conflicts and furthering mission on the basis of agreed-upon frameworks of teaching and witness; the amazingly rich array of ecumenical discussions and dialogues, set loose in the wake of Lambeth’s Appeal for unity in 1920, were premised on the hard-won fruit of theological agreement. Other Christians were, for decades, astonished, not so much at the Communion’s uniformity, but at its thirst for “agreement” and the work Anglicans were willing to put into this just in the midst of their own humanly typical conflicts. Common teaching and common council have never been finished products for Anglicans. They have been given in the mode of hope.

The ordering of the Communion, as it has taken shape over the last 150 years, underscores how historically false are TEC’s claims regarding the way Anglican churches are “meant” to relate to one another. The fact that individual churches have chosen at this or that time – as TEC does today — to ignore the shape of common teaching and the decisions of common council proves nothing about the Anglican Communion other than that some members sometimes reject commonality and the reasons given for it; perhaps they have even lost hope in such coming-together through sheer historical forgetfulness.

The notion, furthermore, that there have never been consequences for rejecting communion commonality is also false, however contested these consequences may have been: concrete examples in 19th- and 20th-century South Africa, in Rwanda in the 1990’s and other smaller disputes are admittedly few and generally not that significant for the larger church. Where real consequences to a rejection of Communion teaching and council have been significant is found in the ad hoc and often more destructive realms of frayed relationships and their knock-on effects: estrangement, broken communion, the decoupling of missionary cooperation and material support, shameful discord in the face of a world in need of reconciliation. It is hard to argue that these informal and inescapable consequences, deriving simply from churches doing their own thing without formal pushback, are good ways of dealing with the rejection of common teaching. It is even harder to claim that they are better than a formal decision-making process that involves representatives from around the Communion. Only a glance at recent Anglican experience shows us how absurd such an argument would be: all around us in the Communion, and in the United States especially, we see the ugly consequences of laissez faire disunity scattered about in the form of rancour, lawsuits, and missionary drought. There are always “consequences” to disunity, most of them ugly and painful. The question is how we can faithfully redirect them towards the fulfillment of divine purpose.

What the Primates did, then, was to respond to a widespread desire for a deliberate rechanneling of the Anglican vocation. If TEC wants to resist this and reap yet more “informal” consequences, she is playing with the forces of her own demise.

3. Political means

TEC bishops tell us that the Communion has no legitimate means, in any case, to formalize the consequences of the Americans’ resistance to the wider church’s requests and witness. This too is false, and patently so. The Primates asked that TEC representatives no longer to serve on decision-making bodies of the Communion that either deal with matters of doctrine and polity, or represent the Communion in inter-church and inter-faith meetings. In fact, most Communion-wide commission-work and counsel is pursed via invitation. Invitation is made mostly through Canterbury or the Anglican Communion Office, and it does not follow any rules of choice or representation. Sometimes nominations for such invitations are solicited, sometimes not. Why invitations might be issued or not is up to the inviter, as Archbishop Rowan Williams showed in 2010 (“the Pentecost Letter”), when he did something similar with respect to TEC representatives according to his own counsel. If the inviter is swayed by the arguments of this or that group, then that is all that is required to control who comes to represent and decide. If Lambeth or the Primates or the ACC or Canterbury itself publicly “decided” that so and so should not be invited to participate in this or that form of Communion counsel, or represent Communion churches because of a failure to embody common teaching and discipline, and if the inviters listened to such a decision, that is all it would take. There is no code of Communion canon law and no tribunal that makes any of this enforceable; there is only the collective of the Communion’s leaders themselves. But where else is communion’s Christian force humanly embodied? Participation in the Communion’s formal life is not a right, but a privilege, based on the movement that is the Communion’s own apostolic evangelical witness.

4. Primates’ place.

Over and over TEC bishops have decried what they see as the Primates’ usurpation of powers. In this, rightly or wrongly, our bishops are behind the curve. The Primates have, over time, been given a very prominent place in the evolution of the Communion’s life. Obviously, the very category of archbishop and primate could only come to be as Anglican churches could form their own integrities, become locally independent and finally move towards a fully indigenized ministry. Much of this was driven by the mission and the apostolic quest for catholicity itself. So it is no surprise that it waited until the post-colonial moment of the 1960’s for the very notion of a “Primates Meeting” to emerge. In the late 1970’s this took concrete form, first with the locating of the Primates as an important aspect of common teaching and council – the Primates’ Meeting itself was born – and then with recommendations for the Meeting to assume greater leadership. Three successive Lambeth Conferences tell the tale:

The Lambeth Conference of 1978 passed Resolution 11 urging “member churches not to take action regarding issues which are of concern to the whole Anglican Communion without consultation with a Lambeth Conference or with the episcopate through the Primates’ Committee (emphasis added) and requests the Primates to initiate a study of the nature of authority within the Anglican Communion.”

1988 broadened the scope of the responsibilities assigned the Primates’ Meeting. Resolution 18.2 “Urges that encouragement be given to a developing role for the Primates Meeting under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so that the Primates’ Meeting is able to exercise an enhanced responsibility in offering guidance on doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters (emphasis added).”

The 1998 Conference reaffirmed Resolution 18.2 (1988) noting that it “urges that encouragement be given to a developing collegial role for the Primates’ Meeting under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so that the Primates’ Meeting is able to exercise an enhanced responsibility (emphasis added) in offering guidance on doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters.” The Conference further asked “that the Primates’ Meeting, under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, include among its responsibilities positive encouragement of mission, intervention in cases of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within provinces, and giving guidelines on the limits of Anglican diversity (emphasis added) in submission to the sovereign authority of Holy Scripture and in loyalty to our Anglican tradition and formularies.”

Since 1998, the Primates have been trying to follow these recommendations, albeit with some confusion at times, and certainly with some opposition. Their precise role and the form it takes are developing. That development is precisely how our Communion works as a Communion. The direction of the Primates’ Meeting’s emergence could be reversed, and TEC is free to argue (as some have) that it should be reversed. What TEC cannot argue persuasively is that the role of the Primates’ Meeting has been appropriated by misdemeanor, hijacked, invented, and so on. Not so. The fact that the Covenant’s first draft placed the Primates in the position they have recently assumed – a recommendation many supported even though it was later revised – was but a sign of this movement laid out by successive Communion recommendations.

Perhaps the argument made by some in TEC, that the Primates are, if not illegitimate in their actions, at least “unrepresentative” of the Communion, is a better line of attack. Yet this too would be a false assertion.. Short of universal franchise for every Anglican in the world (and we don’t even know who they are in our own parishes!), “representativeness” is a conventional act, not a quantitative science. Within Anglicanism, since the 16th century and reaffirmed repeatedly, that convention has, rather decidedly, been ordered around the episcopacy in a primary way. To be sure, the Primates constitute a group of mostly old men. But then, so does the House of Bishops of TEC (plus a few old women), along with the leaders of TEC’s General Convention as a whole. Come to think of it, it sounds like TEC all the way down.

Conclusion: What TEC leaders need to decide

It is worth bringing up the Anglican Covenant here, not to make any argument about it specifically, but simply to point to the way that the dynamics at work in the Primates’ directives are just those that the Covenant attempted to address. The notion that “the Covenant is Dead In the Water”, repeated by many TEC leaders and their allies, is wishful thinking at least when it comes to underlying substance: the Primates are trying to do what the Covenant itself is far more systematically laid out to do. They are doing so because Anglican churches have, thus far, failed to engage what they need to engage if they are to be truly Anglican Communion churches. Thus, in one form or another, the Covenant by some name or other, is not going away: what pressed for its articulation continues to press us. Instead of continuing to dig their heels into the ruts of rejection, TEC leaders should try to contribute to the creative ordering of the Communion as it really is.

The current discussion around the Primates’ directives has failed to substantiate TEC claims. Just the opposite: that discussion now only underscores the vanity of all those accusations regarding Communion “coercion” of member churches. Just as TEC is free to ignore any other church in the prosecution of its own affairs, so the Communion does not constrict the internal workings of this or that church. Today’s requests and “consequences”, just as the Covenant’s relational expectations, have always been framed by the inherent freedoms of local Anglican churches to determine their own way forward. One of those ways is “communion”, and its historically vibrant form in the Anglican Communion. Another way involves the rejection of communion altogether. TEC is free to be a part of communion or not. There are no legal compulsions in this regard.

But TEC leaders need to be clearer in their own mind as to what is at stake here. Some might feel that ecclesial discussions like those above are all beside the point. Some have, in fact, insisted that the matter of same-sex marriage for same-sex attracted persons is one of fundamental human dignity and justice; the ecclesial issues of Communion are irrelevant to its affirmation by this or any other church. That may be the case so far as TEC wishes to claim, according to its own special view. And the hurt some Episcopalians have strenuously voiced surely derives from their sense of indignation that justice, as they perceive it, is being denied.

Nonetheless, as long as the matter of same-sex attracted behavior is legitimately discussed and debated within the Church – and most TEC bishops still tell their conservative colleagues, priests and laypeople that such debate and diversity is legitimate – then the Communion can discuss and debate it, as they have. In doing so, the Communion’s leaders can claim, as did the Primates, that human dignity attaches to persons, not to internal feelings or behaviors, which are to be otherwise evaluated theologically; hence it is necessary to repudiate homophobia and civil penalties against same-sex attracted persons, even while insisting on the divinely created norm of heterosexual marriage. Furthermore, just as TEC’s General Convention has moved ahead to decide the issue for itself, so too can the Communion move ahead within the realm of its competencies to decide this or any other issue on the basis of Communion-wide counsel.

If, on the other hand, TEC leaders want to say that there is no longer any room for diverse perspectives and practical decisions to be made on the matter, the Communion’s life is indeed irrelevant to TEC’s life. But then why bemoan what the Communion’s Primates have decided on the basis of common discernment? TEC leaders would have already judged common discernment and decision-making as retrograde.

What TEC leaders cannot reasonably say is that the choice for Communion does not involve the commitments, responsibilities, and consequences tied up with Communion life – with common mission, catholic identity, and ecumenical witness. Hurt feelings are not a substitute for any of these realities. The next three years will require of TEC clarity and hard decisions about this. Without that, “safe distance” will become simply “distance”, and new and fuller tears will then be shed, and deservedly so.

Let TEC then be clear about the character of its independent life vis-à-vis a bona fide historical reality called the Anglican Communion. Let it seek to clarify its present self-understanding. Let it speak this out clearly so that the larger Communion can hear and understand who TEC now wants to be, and in just this way, how it wants to differentiate itself vis-à-vis the historical Communion’s evolution and present life. There is no need for too much sensitivity, but only clarity about its new self-understanding.

Introduction: the development of the Anglican debate about same-sex relationships since 2000.

In my previous roles as the Theological Secretary of the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity and Theological Consultant to its House of Bishops and in my current role as the Academic Consultant to the Church of England Evangelical Council, I have been tracking the development of the Anglican debate about same-sex relationships over the past fifteen years. During that time the focus of the debate has kept moving.

When I started working at Church House, London, in 2000 the focus of the debate was still on the issues that had been discussed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, namely whether it would be right to offer some form of blessing to same-sex relationships and whether it would be right for those in a same-sex relationships to be ordained as Deacon or Priest.

In 2003 the election and subsequent consecration of Gene Robinson as the first Anglican bishop in a same-sex partnership moved the debate on to the question of whether it was right for those in same-sex relationships to be appointed as bishops (a debate that was also raised in a Church of England context by the proposal to appoint Jeffrey John as the Suffragan Bishop of Reading).

Post 2003 the blessing of same-sex relationships and the ordination of those in same-sex relationships as Deacons and Priests has become a fairly frequent occurrence in large parts of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada and in 2010 Mary Glasspool became the second bishop in a same-sex partnership to be consecrated in the Anglican Communion when she became a Suffragan Bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles.

However, since 2010 the focus of the debate has moved on again with the new focus being on the issue of same-sex ‘marriage.’ With an increasing number of countries beginning to permit civil same-sex ‘marriages’ the question has begun to be raised more and more insistently as to whether churches should not offer a blessing to those who have entered into civil same-sex ‘marriages’ or even conduct same-sex ‘marriages’ themselves.

The Scandinavian Lutheran churches with whom the British and Irish Anglican churches are in communion through the Porvoo agreement have all moved in this direction from 2009 onwards and since 2013 three Anglican churches have begun to move towards the introduction of same-sex ‘marriages’ with the Anglican Church of Canada being the first to move in 2013 and the Scottish Episcopal Church and The Episcopal Church following them in the summer this year.

The Church of England has so far resisted the idea that it should move in the same direction, with the traditional Christian view of marriage being upheld in its 2013 Faith and Order Commission statement Men and Women in Marriage and in the House of Bishops Pastoral Guidance on Same Sex Marriage issued in February 2014.

However, since same-sex ‘marriages’ became legal in Great Britain in 2014 a number of Church of England laity and clergy have entered into them. In addition the majority report of the House of Bishops Working Group on Human Sexuality (the ‘Pilling’ report) recommended in 2013 that priests should ‘be free to mark the formation of a permanent same sex relationship in a public service’ and if this recommendation eventually becomes Church of England policy the pressure to move from this half way house to the solemnization of same-sex ‘marriages’ will become acute.

What all this means is that although the debate about the blessing of same-sex relationships and the ordination and consecration of those in such relationships have not gone away the new storm centre in the Anglican Communion is going to be same-sex ‘marriage.’

In this paper I provide an introduction to this debate by setting out and assessing the arguments for same-sex ‘marriage’ put forward in reports from the Scottish Episcopal Church, The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. At the end of the paper I will give an overview of what I think we have learned about the key issues in the debate and the challenges facing the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

]]>The New Episcopal Church: What Hath General Convention 2015 Wrought?http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/07/the-new-episcopal-church-what-hath-general-convention-2015-wrought/
Mon, 27 Jul 2015 23:06:42 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1225The Anglican Communion Institute has followed with care and interest the decisions of The Episcopal Church’s (TEC’s) General Convention 2015. We have pondered key aspects of these decisions, and spoken to a range of participants and members of the broader Anglican Communion.

In summarizing our reflections, we note that the following things are clear:

A Trial Rite for same-sex marriage (A054) was passed in the House of Bishops a) without a roll call vote and b) without a majority of all the Bishops entitled to vote, as prescribed by the Constitution. By this action, the plain sense rules agreed to by all in the form of Constitutional order have now been reduced to whatever decision General Convention agrees at the time.

The scriptural texts and the plain language of the Book of Common Prayer Pastoral Office for the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage are now subject to a generic fallacy: the particular language and logic of one man and one woman are held to be examples of the use of “mankind” to refer to men and women in earlier times. That this is manifestly not analogous is made clear by the necessity of the removal of Mark 10 as one of the central texts to be read at marriage services. Neither Genesis nor Mark refer to “man and woman” as examples of non-generic language meaning “people” or “persons.” So by this canonical action (A036), the character of the Book of Common Prayer rites has been reduced to societal accident and happenstance. It is little wonder then, by this same logic, that the rubrics and core understanding of the sacrament of Holy Communion were only narrowly upheld over against appeals for “open communion.” This is the result of treating the Book of Common Prayer as a kind of smorgasbord of liturgical possibilities: a set of suggestions which each new age’s aspirations are to transform. The need for constitutionally approved measures for altering the BCP is now a former age’s quibble.

By contrast, we believe that Genera Convention 2015 has left the following things quite unclear.

On the one hand, the HOB insisted that a Trial Rite has in some sense to be authorized by a Diocesan Bishop before it can be used “throughout the church” in his or her diocese. This is consistent with the regulations governing a Trial Rite (we can leave aside whether the origins of Trial Rite usage presupposed wholescale BCP revision, which is not at issue in the case of creating rites just for a new understanding of “generic marriage”). Yet A054 also insists that Diocesan Bishops must “make provision” for the new rites. Just what does this collision between a Diocesan Bishop’s authority to regulate rites and a requirement for making provision mean? The answer is, “no one knows because this is what happens when you set up a collision as has been done.” This means that various proposals can be envisioned or are being formally declared. Bishop X works with neighboring Bishops to see that the rites are provided elsewhere and not within his diocese or by his clergy. Bishop Y attempts this and neighboring Bishop says No. Bishop Z uses some version of the “Doyle Plan.” Bishop W wants flying Bishops to come into his diocese, but finds that LGBT couples want marriages in parishes where the congregations are divided. So how does this all shake out?

Given the latitude with which the BCP and the C/C are being treated, and given that The Episcopal Church has no Historical Confessions, supreme Ecclesiastical Court, Book of Discipline, Barrier Act or other mechanisms for ordering its common life, how are we to understand the future of this church body? And how are we to understand the role of a Bishop and a Diocese, itself governed by constitution and canons?

The current situation

The Anglican Communion Institute has over the past decade argued that The Episcopal Church runs the risk of cutting itself off from the very documents that give it identity (including Holy Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer and the Constitution). This is now a fait accompli. We have before us a New Episcopal Church.

Even the illusion of the Episcopal Church as its own kind of world-wide Communion—a notion invented to offset the concerns and claims of the Anglican Communion as such, after the consecration of Bishop Robinson—suffered a grievous blow at General Convention 2015. We witnessed the entire bloc of Central American Bishops, on behalf of their dioceses, dissenting from the actions of General Convention in the area of canonical and Prayer Book revision regarding marriage. Where that new development will lead is but one further area of confusion post General Convention 2015.

What is not unclear is that all calls to adhere to our historical polity, constitutional governance and the rule of law have been rejected by those who gathered at the last GC. We will now witness a new kind of NEC “Bishop”; a new understanding of the NEC Diocese and its Constitution and Canons vis-à-vis General Convention’s most recent actions; a new conception of the authority of the Book of Common Prayer; a fresh confusion over just how the new A054 will find its footing in conservative dioceses, perhaps only clarified via disciplinary action or social-media campaign and advocacy.

The time ahead

All this points to a time ahead of stress and uncertainty for Anglicanism in the United States. ACI believes that the following elements, however, must be recognized and acted upon if this time ahead is to prove fruitful rather than simply destructive.

First, we must acknowledge that TEC as a national body is no longer recognizably “Anglican” in an Anglican-Communion sense. A broad range of commonly defining features of Anglican Communion churches – e.g. the Lambeth Quadrilateral, which makes Scripture the “rule and ultimate standard of faith”; the definition of Anglicanism specified in TEC’s own constitution and in 1930 Lambeth Conference Resolution 49 (i.e., “upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer”); other Lambeth resolutions including 1998 I.10; the Windsor Report and its moratoria that were subsequently adopted by all the Instruments of Communion; the framework of an Anglican Communion “Common Law” (as N. Doe and others have identified it), etc. — no longer exists in TEC.

Second, dioceses, bishops, priests, and laity who are currently members of TEC, but who do​ continue to hold their identity within the common Anglican elements noted above, need to set about, corporately and in a coordinated way, to work with the larger Anglican Communion for a way forward. That kind of work has, in the past, been subverted by a range of local and larger factors, including personal ones. Something different has to happen at this point, and both the American and Communion leadership concerned with this must work with a new consultative forthrightness and clarity.

Third, we believe that American Communion-minded Anglicans must formally call on Canterbury, and the Primates to respond to the need expressed above expeditiously and constructively. Past reticence, foot-dragging, deference to local politics, and simple failures to follow through are no longer viable ways forward.

Fourth, we urge friends and ecumenical partners to play a consultative, constructive and creative role in this process.

Insofar as TEC has claimed it has a life in the Anglican Communion it cares about, just to that degree it is necessary for the Anglican Communion to clarify what that might be, in the light of General Convention actions and the new self-understanding in NEC. General Convention has acted and declared its mind. What will the response of the Anglican Communion be?

]]>Good Order And The Re-Definition of Marriagehttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/06/good-order-and-the-re-definition-of-marriage/
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 01:25:27 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1220On the eve of a General Convention that will consider several important proposals to change the definition of marriage in the Church’s doctrine, discipline and worship, much attention is directed, perhaps belatedly, to the question of good order. Several bishops generally sympathetic to the idea of same sex marriage have expressed concerns that the way in which that innovation is now being proposed violates “good order.” Rejecting this charge, the Task Force on the Study of Marriage, also sympathetic to same sex marriage, has offered an amendment to the marriage canon that it claims will promote rather than undermine “good order.” The Task Force’s secretary, who states that he was “one of the members most closely involved in …the wording of the canon,” responds to the question of order:

Far from “directing clergy to disobey” the BCP, the canon change addresses the current situation, in which we have clergy, operating under “generous pastoral provision,” solemnizing same-sex marriages in those states in which the civil law permits, in violation of the current canon, and, if you accept the logic of Benhase and McConnell, in conflict with the BCP as well. It is true that the canon change will do nothing to change the BCP — or to authorize any other liturgy, for that matter — but it will remove the problem of clergy being in violation of the canons. And it is only the canon we are proposing to change.

So if the bishops are interested in “good order” as they say, this is a step they should applaud. It introduces no new conflict with the BCP — that conflict is already there, if you accept their logic — but it does remove the canonical dissonance, which is actionable under Title IV, in spite of the wink and nod of “generous pastoral provision.”

[Emphasis in the original, including the emphasis that the current practice is in violation of the canons.]

Notwithstanding this debate, “good order” is not that difficult to define. Indeed, it is defined, at least in part, in the definitions of Canon IV.2, which state that the “Discipline of the Church shall be found in the Constitution, the Canons and the Rubrics and the Ordinal of the Book of Common Prayer.” Canons IV.3 and IV.4 then go on to specify that violation of any of these instruments subjects a member of the clergy to discipline. Whatever else “good order” may be, it surely requires at a minimum that the Church comply with its own fundamental instruments of governance as defined in its disciplinary canons. In the context of re-defining marriage, therefore, good order would require that any proposal not be inconsistent with the Constitution, the canons or the rubrics of the BCP.

One might add that good order also requires the Church to comply with its own defined doctrine, which too is specified in Canon IV.2:

Doctrine shall mean the basic and essential teachings of the Church and is to be found in the Canon of Holy Scripture as understood in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and in the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer.

Canon IV.4 requires a member of the clergy to “abide by the promises and vows made when ordained,” one of which—constitutionally mandated—is the undertaking to conform to the doctrine of the Church. Thus, “good order,” even in the minimalist sense of avoiding violation of church disciplinary canons, requires conformity to “the basic and essential teachings of the Church” as found in four specified places: the Creeds, the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and the Catechism.

What are the implications of these canonical provisions for the consideration of “good order” in the re-definition of marriage?

First, the marriage rubric (BCP, p.422) begins “Christian marriage is a solemn and public covenant between a man and a woman in the presence of God.” This rubric is part of the “discipline of the Church” as defined in Canon IV.2.

Second, the Catechism (BCP, p. 861) provides that “Holy Matrimony is Christian marriage, in which the woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.” The Catechism also defines (BCP, p. 860) “sacramental rites” of the Church to include Holy Matrimony. Both the Catechism and the sacramental rite of marriage are thus part of the “doctrine” of the Church as defined in Canon IV.2, conformity to which is canonically required.

Third, the marriage canon (I.1.18) requires clergy to conform to “the laws of this Church governing the solemnization of Holy Matrimony” and provides that “Holy Matrimony is a physical and spiritual union of a man and a woman.”

Fourth, Art. X of the Constitution specifies the procedures by which the BCP, containing the sacramental rites and rubrics for Holy Matrimony and the Catechism, can be amended: affirmative votes at two successive General Conventions, the second by a majority of all bishops entitled to vote and a majority in a vote by orders of all dioceses entitled to representation.

Introducing same sex marriage into the Church in good order would require honoring all of these provisions until they are amended in accordance with the required constitutional procedures.

ACI opposes the re-definition of marriage for several reasons, not least because it is an unwarranted departure from the teaching of Scripture as understood by the Church throughout the ages that would have profound internal, Communion and ecumenical consequences. Nonetheless, if TEC is determined to proceed on this course the way to re-define marriage in good order is the following:

Step 1: propose a revision to the BCP, including the rubrics, the marriage rite and the Catechism and pass this proposed revision on first reading in 2015; or alternatively, adopt a proposed revision to all of these parts of the BCP for trial usage.

Step 2: prepare a revision to the marriage canon for consideration in 2018 when and if the second reading of the BCP revisions are passed by the required vote or whenever the proposed revision is passed by the constitutionally specified majorities.

Step 3: prohibit all clergy from violating the rubrics, canons and Catechism until they are revised by proper procedures.

None of this is obscure; to the contrary, it is obvious. Yet the most remarkable thing about the many resolutions offered on marriage (ten so far) is that not a single one even proposes the obvious first step required of good order: amending or revising the BCP. To be sure there are four resolutions (C017, C022, C026 and D026) that reference the BCP, but none of them attempts to comply with the constitutional requirements for amending it. Instead, they flagrantly attempt to circumvent the Constitution by re-interpreting the language of the BCP:

the language “man and woman” and “husband and wife” therein shall be equally applicable to two people of the same gender, and all gender-specific language shall be interpreted to be gender-neutral, and may thus be modified as necessary for the purposes of the said Canon, and of the said rites. (C017.)

The Constitution is explicit on changing the BCP: “no alteration” of the BCP is permitted except in accordance with the specified procedures. By their own terms, these “interpretation” resolutions purport to “modify” the BCP rites. Passage of any one of these resolutions would thus reflect the Church expressing its collective contempt for its own Constitution.

Moreover, none of these resolutions even bothers to mention the rubrics or the Catechism, which are part of the canonically-defined discipline and doctrine (respectively) of the Church. This omission points to another insurmountable problem with these resolutions: they falsely imply that the re-definition of marriage is simply a matter of changing a word here or there, “man” to “woman” here, “husband and wife” to “spouses” there. But consider these parts of the BCP marriage rite:

The introduction by the celebrant: “The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.”

The initial prayer: “O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing….”

And the Scriptures suggested for the rite: Genesis 2:4-9, 15-24 (A man cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh); Mark 10:6-9, 13-16 (They are no longer two but one).

The covenant of marriage established by God in creation is that reflected in the suggested Scripture reading: “a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” As the Scripture lesson shows, this covenant is that referenced by Jesus in his primary teaching on marriage: “But from the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’.”

As Jesus’ reference to the covenant of marriage established in creation demonstrates, this covenant also reflects the broader creation account, which is another of the suggested readings and the one quoted in the initial prayer of the BCP rite: “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Jesus teaches us that the crucial part here is that God created us male and female. What is one to make of these parts of the marriage rite when instructed that “all gender-specific language shall be interpreted to be gender-neutral”?

The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music answers this question. The alternative marriage rite it proposes (A054) simply omits any reference to “covenant of marriage established by God in creation” and the Scriptural readings that reference this covenant, including the passage from Mark just quoted. This proposed rite also truncates the crucial (in our Lord’s teaching) but inconvenient reference to “male and female” in the Scriptural creation account in the initial prayer. These proposed alterations highlight a profound point: if TEC were to adopt “marriage equality,” meaning the same understanding of marriage for opposite sex and same sex couples, that understanding of marriage could no longer be that it is the covenant established by God in creation. It would be something else. It would be something other than what TEC now understands marriage to be. And it would be something new for opposite sex couples as well as same sex couples, if the covenant were truly to be the same for both. These emendations by the SCLM show that whatever TEC may mean by marriage in the future, whatever manmade covenant of mutual support and fidelity it would be, it would not be the covenant established by God in creation. That understanding would have to be jettisoned along with the gender-specific language. Does the Church mean to change the fundamental understanding of marriage for all people?

These resolutions seeking to re-interpret the BCP without following the Constitution are not the only ones to run afoul of even the most basic understanding of good order. There are four resolutions (A036, C022, C024, C026) that would amend the marriage canon without first amending the constitutionally-mandated BCP. The advocates of amending the canon resist the objection that such an amendment would be inconsistent with the BCP. Again, Tobias Haller, the secretary of the Task Force:

The issue isn’t that “the BCP supersedes the Canons” — but they are different documents governing different aspects of marriage….If — and it is an “if” — the church continues to authorize liturgies for same-sex marriages, then the canons need to provide procedures that address that reality.

But the Church does not yet properly authorize liturgies for same sex marriage. Haller himself admits they are now done “in violation of the current canon,” meaning the marriage canon, I.18. But they are also done in violation of Canon IV.4.1(b), which requires clergy to “conform to the Rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer.” The inconsistency presented by the proposed amendment is that it permits what the BCP forbids. It is disingenuous to claim that because the BCP provision is still intact the amendment would do no harm to the good order of the Church when the sole purpose of the amendment is to circumvent that BCP prohibition. If the BCP rubric and Canon IV.4.1 continue to foreclose the celebration of same sex marriages there is little point in amending Canon I.18.

Similarly lacking in good order is the proposal (A054) of the SCLM to “authorize” a “supplemental” same sex marriage liturgy and encourage the clergy of the Church “to provide generous pastoral response” to same sex couples by using this supplemental rite. As the SCLM itself notes in another resolution it is proposing (A066), General Convention does not have the constitutional authority to authorize supplemental liturgies. In A066 the SCLM proposes amending the Constitution to give General Convention this authority and states by way of explanation that “the Constitution allows the General Convention to authorize alternative forms of worship only for trial use as a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer.” So, in A066 the SCLM concedes General Convention lacks the authority to do what it is proposing in A054. Neither that flagrant foul nor the encouragement to violate the existing canons by providing what is discreetly called “generous pastoral response” can be said to comport with any definition of good order.

In 2010 the Diocese of South Carolina amended its constitution to provide that it acceded only to the Constitution of TEC, removing its prior reference to the canons. It made clear at the time that it was not leaving TEC by doing so, and it continued to participate in the life of the Church. With this amendment it joined 15 other dioceses, including Connecticut and North Carolina, that acceded only to the Constitution, and South Carolina continued to surpass another seven dioceses that had no accession clause whatsoever. Yet the bishop of South Carolina was certified for abandonment of the Church for this action while the bishops of Connecticut and North Carolina are candidates for Presiding Bishop.

Bishops who testified truthfully in a court of law that they agreed with a view of church polity that had a long and venerable history were accused of abandonment—not just violation of the canons, but abandonment of the Church—while other bishops openly and notoriously flout the doctrine and discipline of the Church (as defined in Canon IV.2) with impunity—and are encouraged by General Convention itself to continue to do so.

At its most basic, “good order” is adherence to the rule of law. Those in the minority have little say in the promulgation of Church constitutional and canon law, but those in the legislative majority should have no reason to disregard the very canons they write. Surely a fundamental change in the understanding of marriage and therefore in the doctrine of the Church—if possible at all in a Church that considers itself apostolic—should be done in good order, in full and robust compliance with the Constitution, the canons, and the BCP until they are constitutionally changed.

Men, women and children are distinct and united in their living forms. As a man and a woman unite in sexual intercourse, a child is conceived and then given birth. The physical elements involved in this are obvious and particular. The bond between a mother and her child is among the deepest that is experienced, and goes beyond (but includes) hormones and breast-feeding. It is shaped through a range of physical elements still not well understood. The relationship of a father to this bonded unity has been socially prescribed and encouraged in a variety of ways over time, mainly to uphold the father’s protection and support of the lives of the mother and their child. There is a raft of historical, and much contemporary social evidence, that the weakening of a father’s general, but very concrete role, has harmful effects on mothers and children both, as well as (less well understood) on fathers’ own well-being.

Marriage, understood as between a man and woman, has primarily engaged these realities, and, in various cultural forms, has been defined by them intimately and definitively. Every society within the history of the world that we know of has not only understood marriage as the profound locus of human coming-to-be in this way, but has also been committed to finding ways to guard and strengthen this reality. Not all male-female couplings give rise to the conception of children; but every such coupling derives from a previous procreative marriage, by definition. Hence, marriage has almost always been sacralised in some way as standing at the basis of human life.

TEC’s proposed redefinition of marriage goes to the heart of these realities. It is not primarily about whether two men or two women can live together as physically intimate and emotionally connected couples. That has already been decided by the civil courts, and by wider cultural affirmations, permissions, or indifference. Rather, the attempt to redefine marriage has as its outcome the dismantling of the unique reality of man-woman-child relationships that human beings have, to this point, uniquely and universally upheld.

To call other human relationships “marriage”, and to render this broader range of relationships equivalent to the mother-father-child ordering of human coming-to-be is quite effectively to unravel the concept of birth-mothers and -fathers, the unbreakable bond between mothers and their children, and the deep responsibilities of fathers to their birth-giving families. Not only is the concept unraveled, but all these realities are now no longer deemed necessary to human life, but rather optional. Indeed, the optionality of marriage, not as a definition but as the fundamental locus of human coming-to-be is what the redefinition of marriage, such as that proposed by TEC, is all about.

The church must ask itself if, indeed, the father-mother-child elements are interchangeable in human and social value with – mean the same thing as — man-man and woman-woman and man-man-child and woman-woman-child forms of human coming-to-be. It is not enough to say that there have always been “exceptions” to the forms of human marriage: alternative arrangements here and there, childlessness, elderly couplings. None of these adjusted exceptions have ever sought to redefine marriage, optionalize it and thus effectively to dismantle it.

The religious question

At the root of the division over human marriage that proposed changes like TEC’s have engendered is a stark question regarding the status of the facts of mother-father-child marriage outlined above: do these facts have divine and thus revelatory significance? That is, does the fact that children (and thus the partners of future marriages) are physically born from male-female sexual coupling, or that mothers and their children are bound by the deepest of physiological and psychological ties, or that fathers have always had the strongest moral responsibilities towards their mates and children, or that the mother-father-child relationship has been both deeply given as well as protected in the experience of human beings – does any of this in particular have divine revelatory significance? If it does have such significance, does it need to be examined, reflected upon, delighted in, cherished, and submitted to?

Those who favor redefining marriage have basically answered “no” to this question.

Sometimes, they are not aware that they have answered “no”, because they insist that their redefinition need not preclude granting divine revelatory significance to human marriage and the elements that constitute it; instead, they say, they are only adding newly affirmed elements to the traditional definition. However, the “no” is still at work in such arguments, largely because they have not in fact engaged the actual elements of marriage with the detailed care that a “yes” answer compels.

The current Marriage Taskforce Report is a good example of such an obscured “no”. A Christian needs to know, for instance, what we learn about God and our relationship to God from the human fact of a mother breastfeeding her child as a fundamental aspect of that child’s survival and life. The highly abstract ways in which proposals for redefining marriage either ignore outright or skate over these very particular elements of marriage amount, in effect, to a refusal to grant divine status to such elements themselves.
Indeed, such obscured “no”s to the question of human marriage’s divinely revelatory significance strongly contribute to the dismantling of human marriage. They fail to provide the kinds of detailed religious understanding of the actual elements of marriage in a way that could at least withstand the complete and self-conscious rejection of their divine character by others who have no interest at all in any kind of marriage. This goes to the well-founded concern by many that TEC’s marriage proposals are simply under-examined, poorly considered, and thus ultimately irresponsible.

One area where this under-examination and poorly-considered approach to redefinition has been evident is in the treatment of Scripture itself. Those who claim that the detailed elements of human marriage outlined above have divine revelatory significance generally see their claims as inextricably bound up with the witness of Scripture. They even insist that this Scriptural witness is prima facie or self-evidently descriptive of human marriage as a mother-father-child locus of human coming-to-be. Because the Scriptures themselves are rich and complex, such claims can probably never be decisively proven. But those who reject the prima facie witness of Scripture regarding human marriage are at a disadvantage that they must overcome by the kinds of engagement with the details of marriage that has been lacking.

So, for instance, proponents of redefining marriage must be able, not only to muse about, but actually provide a convincing reason why Genesis 2:24 — “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” – should not be seen as definitive of the divinely revelatory aspects of marriage, especially since this verse is repeated in the New Testament by Jesus and Paul.

The verse itself has been subject to a vast tradition of Jewish and Christian examination, reflection, delight, cherishing, and submission. Literally thousands of the greatest minds, hearts, scholars, and saint, not to mention the common faithful, have engaged this verse as a way of understanding what God is saying about human beings as they come to be in the world. The Jewish interpretation of the verse, embodied by Rashi and others, is that the “one flesh” is not primarily about the unitive character of marriage between a man and a woman, but about the child they conceive (an interpretation taken over by some Christians, including contemporary people of such towering intellect as Jean-Luc Marion). Married partners are themselves children of parents, “leaving father and mother”, and coming together in a way that issues in life-giving. The interpretation may be unconvincing, but it marks an example of what taking the Scripture’s straight-forward texts regarding marriage demands in terms of focus. And those who wish to ignore, quickly pass over, or dismiss outright the central importance of texts like Genesis 2:24 have moved outside the communion of reflection that a “yes” to the divinely revelatory aspects of Christian marriage has, over the millennia, gathered. Whether intentional or not, such a failure amounts to a “no”.

Another example, with respect to Scripture, of what is required for a faithful “yes” to God’s revealing work within the human bodies and relations of marriage, involves, not focusing on a single verse, but understanding the relationship of verses to the Scriptural breadth. In the case above, for example, Genesis 2:24 should not be read alone; it only makes sense in conjunction to the creating by God of “the human being” as “male and female” (e.g. in Gen. 1:27). Such a connection properly underlines the revelatory character of marriage’s details as lying in divine creation itself. It furthermore shows how the “goods” of marriage between a man and a woman are defined from the direction of creaturely life and life-giving: the love they have for one another is the love of the two parenting sexes, whether children are given, taken away, or withheld. Our current Book of Common Prayer has understood this well.

Or, to take a more complex example, proponents supporting the redefinition of marriage in the church have often pointed to Leviticus as a singularly unhelpful place to engage God’s revelation, noting this or that verse that seems obviously irrelevant to modern moral sensibilities (e.g laws regarding clean and unclean; repugnant punitive actions; uncomfortable relational commands). Again, though, there is a millennia-long set of traditions by Jews and Christians both of trying to take this book seriously as divinely revelatory, and in a way that is coherent with the divinely revelatory details of human coming-to-be. While the traditions of interpretation in this case are various, the goal has been responsibly unified. One of the great “rules” for such interpretation is that individual verses be coordinated with the larger purposes of Israel’s communal life as described in Scripture. Rather than seeing individual verses of Leviticus regarding sexual relations of men and women as simply representing culturally distant and now rejected forms of power-relationships, the tradition has insisted that these verses reveal God’s being and intentions through their coordination with elements like Leviticus’ later discussion of Jubilee and its genealogical justice; and thereby (for Christians), their revelation of God’s own act of genealogical redemption in Christ.

A “yes” to the divinely revelatory aspects of Christian marriage must make a concerted and profound effort to engage the Scriptures in their interconnected disclosure of God. A failure to do so amounts to a “no” regarding such divine revelation.

The Church must ask itself if attempts at redefining marriage, as in the Marriage Taskforce Report, have taken seriously the revelatory character of Scripture, in its self-evident claims and its exquisitely framed breadth, regarding the divine significance of human marriage. And if such seriousness has been offered, has its alternative interpretations convincingly overthrown the enormous communion of interpretative care that has constituted that which innovators oppose?

What General Convention must decide

Answers to these questions are not insignificant; rather, they are of the most profound imaginable. They touch on what a human being is, and how this is connected with God’s own self-revelation. This is why the questions themselves are so divisive.

Classical Christians – those who identify themselves with that communion of interpretative care that is now being rejected –agree that human marriage does not physically, logically, or divinely support a redefinition that could include same-sex couples. Other Christians who do not identify with this classic understanding may support or at least accept formally acknowledged same-sex relationships of intimate friendship, including civil unions. They may even be prepared to accept the place of children in such relationships, seeing the grace of adoptive parenting in particular circumstances as a profound value.

But all Christians should uphold the presumptive rights of children to be raised by their biological mother and father, and should uphold the presumptive duties of mothers and fathers to raise together their own children. This is of the very nature of the mother-father-child soil that God has called human marriage. These are immovable claims. That is to say, while there are questions that some Christians might argue are open to a variety of answers and pastoral outcomes, they are nonetheless questions to be answered to the side of the fundamental reality of human marriage. The church can properly deal with these questions only if human marriage itself is not allowed to be dismantled as the factual and revelatory reality the church has insisted it is.

The Episcopal Church, in its upcoming General Convention, is not deciding on the value of gay persons or their life together. It is deciding whether it will affirm, support, and cherish human marriage.

]]>Questions for Presiding Bishop Candidates, 2015http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/06/questions-for-presiding-bishop-candidates-2015/
Tue, 16 Jun 2015 14:15:40 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1213The following are questions we would want to see posed to and answered by the current candidates for Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church. We hope that our bishops will make sure that these, or questions like them, are put forward and engaged publicly by the candidates themselves.

In general, the Presiding Bishop is defined as the “chief pastor”, “primate”, “leader”, and “spokesperson” for the national church as it is ordered by General Convention. The Constitution gives the Presiding Bishop no “metropolitical” authority, in that the office has no jurisdiction over other bishops, and the General Convention has explicitly rejected the notion that the Presiding Bishop is an “archbishop”, even in name only. Hence, qualities and commitments that engage pastoral and representative duties should be foremost in assessing candidates, ones that embody the teachings and spirit of Jesus Christ. The questions below relate to such qualities as we understand them in the context of our present times.

Questions to which a “yes” answer should raise serious questions about the candidate’s fitness for the role of Presiding Bishop:

Have you ever or are you now engaged in lawsuits against fellow Christians?

Would you ever use church funds to support lawsuits against fellow Christians?

Would you ever pursue the discipline of a bishop without open engagement and consultation with the House of Bishops?

Would you ever use the disciplinary canons to silence critics of present national church policy?

Do you believe the present Title IV disciplinary canons are constitutional in respect of the role they give to a single Presiding Bishop vis-à-vis fellow bishops, and to a bishop vis-à-vis diocesan priests?

Questions to which a “yes” answer speaks positively to the candidate’s suitability for the role of Presiding Bishop

Will you take the initiative and seek to be an engaged pastor for all Episcopalians, including those with whom you disagree and who may even oppose your ministry?

Will you work for the free and protected space within TEC for classical and traditional Anglican teaching and witness?

Will you defer to the witness and teaching needs of the majority “poor churches” of the world, within the Anglican Communion and other ecclesial bodies, in Africa, Asia and Latin America especially, or within areas of beleaguered minority witness, as in Muslim nations?

Will it be your priority to consult openly and patiently with the full breadth of the Anglican Communion, and with the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, as well as with growing Pentecostal churches, in the face of conflicts over such witness and teaching, and to do so before TEC makes changes that pertain to such witness and teaching?

Do you believe that bishops have authority to order liturgy within their dioceses, according to the BCP’s rubrics, teachings, and usage?

Will you lead in seeking formal discussion and reconciliation with departed Episcopalians and Anglicans now ministering in North America, in ACNA and related churches?

The current Presiding Bishop and her advisors have overseen a period of unprecedented ill-health with respect to TEC’s membership, theological education and evangelistic ministry; with respect to the national church’s fiscal integrity; and with respect to TEC’s larger ecclesial relationships around the world. Some believe that this is all a price worth paying for furthering a set of important values regarding sexual life. We and, we know, many others, cannot agree. We pray that the bishops of our church have realized that another path and that significantly different leadership are now required for the faithful life and witness of our church.

]]>Excluding Your Enemy: A Comment on the Present State of Episcopal Churchhttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/06/excluding-your-enemy-a-comment-on-the-present-state-of-episcopal-church/
Mon, 08 Jun 2015 20:49:37 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1210We write to bring to the attention of the Bishops, Priest, Deacons and Lay Persons of The Episcopal Church (TEC) a matter of grave concern. It is a matter that, left unaddressed in the decision-making of General Convention, now threatens the integrity and public witness of everyone who calls him or herself an Episcopalian: is our church prepared to permit in its midst clergy and lay leaders who, however much they represent a minority opinion, are committed to a traditional reading of TEC’s Prayer Book and Constitution? Or will TEC instead seek to drive such persons out, by invective, discrimination, and abuse of the disciplinary canons?

The current situation that has given rise to this question is long in the making. Over the last few decades, debates over women’s ordination first, and then over same-sex affirmation, particularly associated with Gene Robinson’s election and consecration as bishop of New Hampshire, set in motion dynamics of mutual recrimination and finally litigious confrontation. Some more conservative members of TEC left, others were determined to stay, and the lines of acrimony and litigation proliferated, abetted by new internet media.

The very public and evangelically shameful debates of these past years have poisoned our church and our hearts. “Quisling”, “apostate”, “bigot”, and “homophobe”, as deployed in these exchanges have been terms that serve one purpose. They place those to whom they refer in a realm of moral and/or religious darkness. People who by Baptism are brothers and sisters in Christ are now placed outside the circle of fellowship. These terms signal de facto excommunication. It is not surprising, therefore, that on a number of occasions the breaks in fellowship that have littered the last two decades were followed by direct calls by progressives for opponents of the sanctification of same-gender sexual relations to leave the church. At the same time those who had left called upon those who remained to do the same. The tensions over sexual ethics within TEC thus produced a curious outcome. Those who disagreed with the direction in which TEC was headed were called upon to leave both by those who agreed and those who disagreed with the course TEC seemed and still seems to be following.

It is also the case, however, that, from both left and right, calls for dissenters to leave TEC had their origin in animosity and private judgment rather than in a recognized process of ecclesial judgment. Given the poisoned atmosphere, it was inevitable perhaps that attempts to be rid of the dissenters by means of official processes would follow their vilification. And follow they did – which brings us into the present: In 2013, accusations related to Title IV of the Canons were brought against a number of Bishops and Presbyters – including some of us at ACI — because they had signed an Amicus Brief with the Texas Supreme Court arguing, on the basis of TEC’s Constitution, for a more decentralized notion of diocesan authority vis a vis the General Convention of TEC than that presented by the lawyers of the Presiding Bishop.

Because of this action the dissenting Bishops and Presbyters were accused of violating the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church. The accusation remains quite troubling. Because Bishops and Presbyters, who are charged with upholding the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church, opposed a reading of that doctrine and discipline held by the current lawyers of the Presiding Bishop and because they had shared these views with a court of law charged with adjudicating a dispute among Episcopalians, they were accused of violating both TEC’s doctrine and discipline and their ordination vows. The very idea was Orwellian. The accused, after all, had contributed their views to this secular legal process only in reaction to cases brought in the first instance not by them but by the Office of the Presiding Bishop.

The dissenting clergy firmly believed a legal victory by the lawyers representing the Office of the Presiding Bishop would give the Presiding Bishop and the General Convention inordinate and unconstitutional power to enforce their views of church doctrine and discipline on dissenters of any stripe. Had the Office of the Presiding Bishop prevailed, the animus expressed in the phrase “You ought to leave” would have moved from private opinion to the official judgment “you are out”, and this new power of judgment would have become the prerogative of the Presiding Bishop’s office. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that subsequently courts in Texas, Illinois and South Carolina have agreed with the constitutional arguments the dissenting Bishops and Presbyters presented. It is also ironical that progressive voices that once called for dialogue in respect to divisive issues now called for the departure of their opponents.

These events occurred just two years ago. But in the build-up to the General Convention this July, other matters provide a new basis for the dynamics of vituperative exclusion. Calls are being made, for instance, that newly elected bishops actually be asked “are you or have you ever been associated with the ACI?”; a positive response being seen as grounds for refusal of consent. More intricately, formal proposals are being pressed at the upcoming General Convention to change TEC’s canons so that same-gender marriage and not just blessings are permitted. Should these efforts succeed, the General Convention by simple say-so will have rendered the stated doctrine of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer without binding authority. Anticipating this outcome many claim that Bishops will have to permit same gender blessings and marriages in their diocese or face discipline, just as did those who suggested that TEC’s Constitution be read in a way contrary to the current Presiding Bishop’s. There is good reason to believe that this change in doctrine and practice will become mandatory in all dioceses. Indeed, as we write, the blogs are filled with invective and statements to the effect that “It’s time for those who disagree to leave.”

Invective aside, we do not believe that TEC’s constitution, in respect to doctrine and worship, permits making obligatory for a Diocesan Bishop anything other than the Book of Common Prayer. Obviously, this is an arguable position, but the argument in support is powerful. It is based on a careful reading of TEC’s constitution. Any contrary opinion must be based on the same sort of close reading if it is to claim a serious right to be heard. This dispute touches the ecclesial fate of all, and it deserves better than name-calling and threats of discipline and deposition for those who disagree. Sadly, patience for careful reading and discussion has evaporated. Threats of discipline and legal action against questioners, no matter the care and rigor of their questioning, are now mounting in frequency and these threats have behind them a history of being carried out.

Unfortunately, these important matters are being fought over and decided in an atmosphere of animosity, threat, fear, character assassination and intimidation. What astonishes us is less that these conditions have come to be and more that our leaders remain silent in their midst. They have watched this drama unfold before their eyes for some time—slander, disciplinary vendettas, attempts to bully, along with constitutional and theological indifference. If those of us who oppose the current trends were to ask, “Should we leave?” these leaders would surely answer “No, of course not! We value your witness.” But everything they permit to take place in the church belies this assurance. Though faithful and God-loving leaders of our church, they remain silent before the verbal abuse, the threats, the highly questionable canonical procedures, the exorbitant expenditures on legal action and the very obvious disregard of TEC’s constitution. Those of us who now comprise the dissenting minority wonder aloud if it is not the case that the silence of our leaders stems from an assumption that “If we do nothing, they will leave.”

Those who know us know that we are committed, well-tested members of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Together for almost 50 years we have tried to understand what this membership means and place it within the context of what it means to be a Christian in a fallen world and in a broken church. The issue has to do with faithfulness, perseverance and the person, calling and image of Christ. Our concerns are not about power, money, or influence, but about our common place in Christ’s church and his world. We have written articles and long books on what it means to be a member of Christ’s body. In view of the scope of Christ’s Lordship, we often wonder why we should serve a particular church that in the form of its prosecuting executive clearly does not want us as its members, let alone its servants and friends. So we ask: does our faithfulness belong here or elsewhere?

Our answer continues to be that we must remain in TEC with patient endurance until we are driven out. Alas, it appears that the season of our being driven out has begun. As individuals, our standing matters little. But a church that is in the grip of invective and political attempts to be rid of its articulate critics matters a great deal, at least in its loss of integrity. We can only pray that some of our leaders who see what is happening will speak up, now and as the General Convention unfolds, even if it means opprobrium will also fall on their heads.

]]>Infant Baptism For A Modern Agehttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/05/infant-baptism-for-a-modern-age/
Mon, 11 May 2015 01:29:28 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1204From the end of the Roman Empire into early modern times the Christian Church has, here and there, practiced forced conversions. The most frequent objects of this practice were Jews; and among them were most especially children, “converted” in the form of forced baptism.

The official teachings of the church since the 5th century at least, forbade such forced baptisms, but the practice continued nonetheless. One problem that the church had to face was how to deal with the children thus baptized. Forced baptism of Jewish children judged to be of the age of “reason” was assumed to be valid, without question: by the age of 7 or 8, a child was capable of making his or her own decision for the faith, and Jewish children baptized at that age, even if against the wishes (and pleas) of their parents, were no longer permitted to be classed as Jewish or to live in Jewish settings. But what about younger children and infants? Was their forced baptism, although illicit, still valid – that is, were the children truly baptized? Assuming the form and bare intent of the baptism were followed, the Church judged the baptisms to be “real”: the children were indeed now “baptized Christians”. But then what? If truly baptized Christians, the church concluded, the children needed to be raised as such. Hence, the common practice of the church was to remove from their families Jewish children forcibly baptized, however illicitly, and place them in Christian families or institutions.

We can learn something from this tragic set of episodes in Christian history, besides the deep failure of adults to guard the rights of children. (On the history and debates, there is recent work by Benjamin Ravid, Marina Caffiero, and Marcia Colish.) We can learn something more positive, in that the struggle to deal with forced baptisms, however illicit, points to three key elements in the Christian understanding of baptism itself. First, the sacrament has, in its performance, a divine “effect”; hence, baptized children become Christians. Secondly, baptism assumes reasoned consent by the baptized, or his or her parents. Finally, and as a result, baptism demands, for its integrity, that the baptized be formed within a Christian setting – nurtured and grown in the Christian life (sponsors might assure this somehow). All three elements are necessary to a full understanding of Christian baptism. And yet, as the history itself shows, these elements exist in a kind of malleable integration, that requires discernment about each element’s place in the life of the individual, family, and church in a given place and time.

Within the tradition of the church, the manner of integrating these elements has never been clearly regulated. In the modern era, the practical rejection by the Church of forced baptism has been fueled in part by a growing importance given to the aspect of reasoned consent, which demanded a rethinking of the weight placed on the “effective” side of things. We consider this development faithful and salutary. But in some instances, the three elements have risen up in unbearable tension with each other, so that certain groups of Christians have simply seized on only one aspect, and run with it to the exclusion of the others. This has usually caused ecclesial fragmentation. The Anabaptist movement of “believer’s baptism” is one such example.

But more generally, the catholic tradition, including Anglicanism, has steadfastly maintained that baptism stand as a locus of discernment regarding the three elements of sacramental effect, reasoning consent, and formative context. The current Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law and Catechism mention all three (and stress the parents’ own commitments in faith through the promises and renunciations) but do not calculate their integration. The famous “Gorham Controversy” in the Church of England (c. 1850) ended by practically affirming the same result, if somewhat more dialectically: the church would be a place where a strong doctrine of “baptismal regeneration” (sacramental effectiveness) would coexist with a strong doctrine of reasoned consent and Christian growth (Gorham’s so-called “Calvinist” option). And to this day, the practice of baptizing children and adults both has involved, at least in theory, a careful process of discerning the opening to divine grace, desire, readiness, and commitment to discipleship. The 1979 American BCP reflects this in both its baptismal liturgy and its catechism. This discernment has been in the hands mostly of parish priests, under the direction of their bishops. And it has been accomplished with differing emphases based on circumstance and the individuals involved, but most especially bound up with the various truths and pressures of Scripture’s calling, the church’s teaching, and the encounter of the individual with the Christ who is the “pioneer of our perfection”, leading us forward through testing into life eternal.

I am not providing here a “theology of baptism”, but only identifying essential aspects of baptism’s shape. But these aspects do seem to be essential. And since baptism as a rich locus of discernment seems no longer to be understood, this raises disturbing questions about the future of baptism. An example of this loss of understanding is the recent outcry in Florida related to the baptism of the infant child of a same-sex civilly married male couple. The baptism was scheduled to take place, but was postponed at the last moment. It was never clear why, even when, after it was rescheduled, there were public statements issued by participants. But the assumption made by many was that the original postponement was due to the cathedral dean’s and bishop’s (illegitimate) concerns over the child’s gay parents. This assumption, furthermore, was accompanied by various claims about what baptism “really” is, made by irate bloggers, most of which come down to an almost exclusive sense of baptism’s “effective” aspect: the saving grace of baptism should be withheld from no person. In addition, another and more novel aspect of baptism was also suggested: that it should mark the social recognition of the parents’ own lives (in this case, their same-sex civil marriage), and must therefore be free from discerning pressures altogether. Those, like the Anglican Communion Institute, who have suggested that issues of reasoned consent and formative context should properly be considered in the baptism of the infant, have been excoriated.

In the case of the Florida example, is quite possible that such discernment would yield a legitimate decision to baptise the child; I do not doubt this for a moment. Having gay parents does not automatically preclude such a baptism at all. There are reasons a priest might decide to go forward with it, and I do not necessarily question colleagues who would come to this conclusion. However, it is also possible that discernment regarding the integrity of this baptismal act might yield another decision – and that too must be acknowledged. But the new, thinner view of baptism, buttressed now by an ideological notion of baptism as an instrument of social legitimation for gay couples, seems to have made it morally inexcusable even to suggest that the church has an obligation to discern whether the child’s parents or sponsors properly understand and consent to the teaching of the church on behalf of the child, or whether there is a reasonable expectation that the child himself will be raised into a proper understanding of this faith and practice. This is deeply unfortunate, for it basically rules out reasoned commitment related to the doctrinal context of the church as essential elements of Christian existence. And it does so just at the time when these aspects are more important than ever as necessary aspects of Christian witness in the face of a rapidly expanding secular culture. Put another way: in our era of beleaguered Christian witness in the West, the practice of infant baptism bereft of a robust commitment to self-conscious discipleship and its formation is a recipe for ecclesial collapse. Christians rightly no longer believe that babies must be baptized “no matter what” for whatever reasons – a popular notion that partly lay behind the forced baptisms of the past. Yet we seem to have lost a sense of why this might be so.

In any case, the rapid civil embrace of same-sex coupled parenting, made possible through the civilly upheld techniques of surrogacy – so that children are no longer assumed to have the right to being raised by their mother and father in the first instance – is deeply problematic, and should be resisted by the church. This is not because gay adults cannot provide children with nurturing love. It would be absurd to suggest this. The problems lie elsewhere, including in the social realm of guaranteeing children their rights to their own birth family, and to a context where they themselves will learn to respect and further such rights for others. These rights themselves embody a profound set of realities founded on divine grace. It is only recently that this has become a live issue in our society, so recent, in fact, that churches do not even have any explicit teaching about it.

Churches do, however, have a broad and rich set of teachings about human creation, flourishing, sexuality, marriage, and family that support the fundamental rights of children to their own birth parents, all things being equal, and these lie in part within the realm of marriage doctrine and practice. It is more than appropriate that this rich set of teachings by the church first be saved from being thinned out by ideological debate; and second, that it be brought to bear in the discernment process that is a necessary part of baptism. Not only is it appropriate, it is demanded if the church is to remain faithful to her calling.

]]>Same Sex Marriage and Infant Baptismhttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/05/same-sex-marriage-and-infant-baptism/
Thu, 07 May 2015 17:35:34 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1202A controversy has erupted in the Diocese of Central Florida over an apparent request by the dean of the cathedral to postpone the infant baptism of a same sex couple. This led to Facebook and blog postings, general outrage and immediate calls for charges under Title IV. All this before the facts were known.

Given the lack of knowledge of all the relevant facts in this instance it is not appropriate for reasonable people to comment on this particular case, let alone encourage legal proceedings founded on ignorance of the facts. We will not address this case here. However, the question of baptizing infants of same sex couples raises theological issues deserving comment.

Because an infant is unable to make a profession of faith, the Anglican understanding of Christian initiation requires that this profession is made on behalf of the infant by parents and godparents who thereby undertake to raise the child in the fullness of the faith—the “full stature of Christ.” Baptism is a rite of the church not a civil right of the individual and parents. It is certainly not some kind of medieval amulet against ill fortune for babies.

Under the Anglican concept of “lex orandi, lex credendi” (the rule of prayer is the rule of faith) the public worship of the church is the teaching of the church. When a same sex couple (or an unmarried couple) present their child for baptism they are required to answer publicly the following question:

“Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

I renounce them.”

This question and answer, as well as others in the baptismal covenant, unavoidably present the question of what the church’s teaching on sex outside traditional marriage really is. If the same sex or unmarried couple answers this question affirmatively, they and the officiant are publicly proclaiming that the teaching of the church does not consider their relationship sinful. Under the lex orandi standard, that is the teaching of the church.

What is the teaching of The Episcopal Church on this issue? If it is the same as that of the church throughout the centuries and of the overwhelming majority of Christians today, these parents in irregular relationships cannot give the appropriate assurance and the infant should not be baptized; or the promises on behalf of the child must be made solely by the godparents who do accept the teaching and the responsibilities associated with it; or finally, the rite must be changed to delete any reference to church teaching.

If TEC has a new insight not shared by the apostolic churches that such relationships are not sinful it should boldly proclaim this teaching and bring church discipline to bear on those who dissent.

If TEC has no teaching on this foundational institution of society, the institution that preceded all others, or if it thinks that the matter is doctrinally “indifferent”, it should admit its theological incoherence or indifference, and say so. But it should also desist from mob rule, and recognize that those who maintain the traditional Christian teaching will reflect that teaching in their public worship.

]]>What Then Shall We Do? A Note on the upcoming General Convention of the Episcopal Churchhttp://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2015/04/what-then-shall-we-do-a-note-on-the-upcoming-general-convention-of-the-episcopal-church/
Wed, 29 Apr 2015 17:55:39 +0000http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=1197

It is not with forms of government, as with other artificial contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected, if we can discover another more accurate and commodious, or where trials may safely be made, even though the success be doubtful. An established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established […]To tamper, therefore, in this affair, or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age; and though he may attempt some improvements for the public good, yet will he adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution. (David Hume, “The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”)

There are times in the life of individuals, institutions and communities when they are faced with questions for which received wisdom has no ready answers. As loyal members and Priests of The Episcopal Church (TEC), we find ourselves in precisely this position. As our General Convention approaches, changes are afoot within TEC that either have or soon will alter the worship, common life, governance and identity of our church in ways that render all of them in fundamental ways unrecognizable as continuations of what went before. There are forms of change that constitute evolution and there are forms that result from revolution—the elimination of what went before and the establishment of a new thing. It is this latter form of change that appears to be in process, and we find ourselves without an obvious way to respond. Our purpose in the following is to indicate the nature of these revolutionary changes, the dubious means now being deployed to bring them about and the extraordinary challenges they present to Priests like ourselves who have argued over a significant span of time that neither departure for another church nor schism provide an adequate Christian response to the deformation of the church in which God has placed us. The changes of which we speak can be usefully summarized under three headings—Constitution, The Book of Common Prayer and Mission.

Constitution

The place to begin is with TEC’s constitution. It is here that the revolutionary character of the changes now in process becomes most obvious. No constitution is in itself a “supreme authority” for the simple reason that it is incapable of rendering particular and final judgments in the ordering of common life. Rather, constitutions provide authoritative boundaries within which members of a polity are to engage one another in ordering common life. A constitution, TEC’s included, functions to lead the members of a polity to make decisions in ways that order common life but leave no room for abuse of power, absolutism, arbitrary rule, whimsical change, or indifferent disregard of others. Because it establishes no office or legislative body that has governing authority throughout its various dioceses, TEC’s Constitution provides especially powerful protections against the abusive exercise of authority (Is The Episcopal Church Hierarchical). Obviously, The General Convention (GC) can change the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is constitutionally difficult to do so, for just the reasons that make a constitution desirable. It is, however, astonishing and depressing that some are proposing that GC not only change the constitution, but do so precisely in a way that would centralize authority in the GC, the office of the PB and the Executive Council and in so doing make abuse of power, absolutism, arbitrary rule, whimsical change, and indifferent disregard of others easier and more likely.

GC has in fact already worked successfully in this direction. First, it has passed canonical changes in Title IV that concentrate disciplinary powers vis a vis clergy in the office of individual bishops, and disciplinary powers vis a vis bishops in the office of the Presiding Bishop (Title IV Revisions: Unmasked). Both of these moves have in fact significantly tilted procedural force in the direction of abuse of power, on a diocesan and on a national level. We have examples of this abuse already having happened in, for example, the treatment of Bp. Mark Lawrence, whose constitutionally incoherent conviction of “abandoning the church” of which he was still an active bishop in fact led to the departure of the Diocese of South Carolina from TEC; the mistreatment of the six bishops who, having sworn an oath to uphold the order of TEC, signed an Amicus Brief in Texas stating their understanding of the Constitution; and numerous individual priests, believing they were also so obliged, being subject to arbitrary accusations.

Second, GC has simply ignored the Constitution altogether by “authorizing” multiple liturgical forms that in fact it has no authority to promulgate. This is now even admitted by official TEC committees like the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM). That commission has recognized the need to regularize past egregious flouting of the Constitution in this regard; although, as Seitz and McCall point out (The Episcopal Church and the New Episcopal Church), the SCLM’s solution is, rather than calling for renewed respect for the Constitution, to propose instead that GC weaken the Constitution in the direction of whimsical change and indifferent disregard. Hence, their proposal aims at removing the two-convention rule now in place for revising the BCP, and allowing for changes to our worship at a single sitting of the Convention. This proposal is surely a recipe for the BCP’s complete dissolution as the center of our common life and Christian formation.

Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

We confess Jesus Christ as our Lord, and we seek to follow him in humble faith, bound to our fellow Christians. But our confession and discipleship is ordered with them in the church. In matters of doctrine or authoritative teaching, among Anglicans throughout the world, supreme authority is accorded to Holy Scripture – the “rule and ultimate standard of faith”, as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral puts it. That is, for Anglicans all doctrine must be in accord with the Scriptures. Further, in so far as doctrine is articulated for the church, Anglicans assign authority to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). However, the BCP is not an active authority, one that makes decisions and executes them. It simply states and embodies the Church’s authoritative doctrine in the form of verbalized worship. The Constitution defers to the BCP in this regard, and the rubrics of the BCP reflect this ordering of authority. But the fact that the BCP is only a document, not a legislator or executive, means that its authority is apprehended through the stability of its verbal form. Unless the BCP is allowed to mean what it says, and to have what it says stand as the “saying” of the Church, it is a meaningless authority.

Nevertheless, despite the universally recognized theological authority of the BCP, it is now proposed that GC eviscerate that authority. The proposals before GC this summer do this in two ways. First, there is the proposal to adopt canons which say that what the BCP describes as marriage is not in fact authoritatively meaningful; such a canon, it is believed by the proposers, will permit same-sex marriages to be performed in our church. This proposal for a new canon that alters the BCP’s stated meaning, even without revising the BCP itself, derives from a desire to skirt the constitutional process required for prayer book revision itself. After all, at present, it takes two GC votes, of a certain form and majority, to change the BCP; and it seems that the proposers cannot wait this long or that they fear this constitutional process will stymie their aim Therefore, they propose a canon that asserts that the BCP, in the marriage service, does not mean what it plainly says but may mean other things, or may simply be ignored as to its meaning when it is used.

Second, there are proposals before GC to authorize, and in some cases by implication to demand acceptance and promulgation of, liturgical usages that are not only not BCP liturgies but in fact contradict the rubrics and meanings of the BCP (something forbidden by the Constitution itself). These proposals come down to demoting the BCP altogether as the doctrinal authority of the Church. In place of this authority, obviously, GC would put itself. This also is an opening for abuse of power, absolutism, arbitrary rule, whimsical change, and indifferent disregard of others from which TEC’s constitutional ordering has sought to protect the church.

Coupled with other proposals in the recent TREC report to reorganize TEC’s structures of governance by consolidating the powers of the Presiding Bishops (PB), dissolving the bicameral ordering of GC (thus subverting the long-standing supervisory role of the “historic episcopate” within our church) these moves seek to dismantle the decentralized character of TEC as a people gathered under Scripture through the common prayer of the Church and under the authority of their diocesan bishop who meets in synod with colleagues at home and abroad.

Mission

The Episcopal Church was founded through the sacrificial ministry of Church of England missionaries. The same sacrificial ministry has been behind all Anglican churches in the world, and missionary devotion and fervour now constitute the bloodstream of global Anglicanism. Historians of TEC have made much of the fact that the sole legal corporation of the national church today is in fact an organization called The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS) of the Protestant Episcopal Church. At a key point in the DFMS’s history, in the 19th century, all the members of GC were board members of DFMS, which acted as the single missionary society of the church, raising funds and supporting mission work in America and elsewhere. Other Anglicans in the world were impressed by this centrally organized work for mission, and noted the way that, at least symbolically, it made the “whole church” a missionary group.

Since then, of course, the DFMS has evolved into a legal place-holder for TEC, with its missionary origins and purposes basically lost in the business and bureaucracy of overseeing the large organization known as “815” – the Office of the Presiding Bishop, and various offices related to GC’s commissions and financial needs. The missionary center of TEC, once admired around the world, has simply disappeared.

TEC has been experiencing a period of unparalleled decline, in membership and material resources. Full-time clergy are no longer able to be supported in many congregations; the number of parishes able to train new clergy under supervision has drastically shrunk; seminaries are closing or are in disarray. Some of these elements are part of larger trends that have embraced numerous other Christian churches in N. America; some are peculiar to TEC. But they all add up to a failure to address the missionary vocation of the church more broadly. TEC has, without much success, struggled for several decades to train, support, and engage leaders, lay and ordained, who can pursue primary evangelism. The drastic disappearance of younger members from TEC churches is disturbing. Outreach to the large immigrant communities of the US has gone almost nowhere.

In the face of these negative trends, GC and its Executive, have focused their energies on policies and actions that have only exacerbated the decline. They have pressed forward with decisions that deeply alienated many of their own membership; they engaged in acrimonious litigation that has cost tens of millions of dollars from the “mission funds” of TEC; they have chosen to ignore numerous requests from world Anglicans, including many of their former mission partners, to forgo various moral and liturgical innovations that have been deemed problematic and divisive; they have fostered a spirit of hostility towards their own evangelical members and those of classical Christian commitments in the Communion, as well as towards other Christian churches of classic character; and, as a whole, they have done nothing to further the visible, Gospel-centered, and reconciled unity of their own flock.

Overall, these events and trends manifest an astonishing and ill considered response to the crumbling of TEC’s missionary center, history, and vocation. Episcopalians like ourselves must now wonder, and in a way that was never so acute, whether TEC will remain a historical Anglican church, of constitutional integrity, and capable of taking a responsible place within the Christian world’s missionary life. It was to such a church that we made our vows as priests; it is such a church we have sought to serve faithfully for a combined period of almost 100 years. It is such a church that we have represented in mission work in Africa and elsewhere.

In what way will our General Convention respond to subversion of our church’s governmental forms, common purposes and Gospel character? Viewing these events and trends in the full light of day we are bound to ask ourselves and others the question put to St. Peter by the crowd to which he preached. “Brothers, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37) Peter’s answer was “Repent”—turn around. Given the acrimony and bitterness that now characterizes TEC’s common life it would seem that a turning from our combative ways is certainly called for. As a church we certainly need a fresh start, but a fresh start must begin somewhere. Our analysis of the present treatment of our Constitution and Book of Common Prayer points to this place. Let us pull back and, in the processes of change, adhere to the boundaries the constitution has provided us so that change can come about decently and in order, rather than by slight of hand or the sheer exercise of power. We say this not as a ploy to prevent the blessing of gay unions or changes in the Book of Common Prayer of which we do not approve. We say it for our own common good and for that of future generations of Episcopalians. If, in order to get a result we may want, we disregard the order laid down for us in our constitution we may be certain that at some future date others will come along with a different agenda, and will follow the precedent of lawlessness we will have laid down.

In his play, A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt presents a scene between Thomas More and his son-in-law, William Roper. Roper says to More that he would cut through all the law of England to get to the Devil. More responds, “and after you have cut through all the laws and the Devil turns around and there is nothing between you and him, what then son Roper, what then?” Bolt’s point is germane. After we have cut through the restraints of the Constitution to gain an end, what then? Where is our protection from grotesque abuses of power and all their bitter fruits?